One of the most eclectic and prolific artists in rock music, Steven Wilson has been writing, recording, and producing music continuously since the age of 10. A native of Hemel Hempstead in England, Steven was first exposed to music at the age of eight, when he started hearing his father listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and his mother to Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby, two albums that were pivotal in the development of his musical direction. His father, an electrical engineer, built him a multi-track tape machine, and he began to experiment with overdubbing and developing a repertoire of production techniques.
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Early demo tapes started to emerge in the mid 80’s while Steven was still at school, and at the end of the decade he created the two projects which gained him entry to the professional music world: Porcupine Tree and No Man. Porcupine Tree, which explored psychedelia, progressive music, and his love of ambitious seventies music, was initially an imaginary “band” which, in reality, Steven overdubbed all the instruments himself. This even extended to early demo tapes coming with a fictional written history of the band, and biographical info about the fictitious performers. Around the same time, Steven formed No-Man, his long-term collaboration with singer Tim Bowness. Influenced by everything from ambient music to hip-hop, their early singles and albums were a mixture of dance beats and lush orchestrations.
Meanwhile, things progressed with Porcupine Tree, whose increasing popularity was fast outpacing the imaginary pretext of an actual group. The second full-length album, Up the Downstair was released in 1993 and was praised by Melody Maker as “a psychedelic masterpiece… one of the albums of the year.” This was the first album to include keyboardist Richard Barbieri and bassist Colin Edwin, albeit only as guests at this point, the album was still effectively a solo project. The next album The Sky Moves Sideways was a transitional album featuring both solo SW and band pieces, but from then on it became a full band with the addition of Chris Maitland on drums. Further albums throughout the late nineties, and extensive touring resulted in a string of indie chart placings and critical acclaim, many fans hailing them as the Pink Floyd of the nineties.
Starting in 2003 Steven quietly started to release music under his own name. Between January and August of 2008, Steven began recording material that would comprise Insurgentes. A second solo album Grace For Drowning was recorded in 2010-11 and released in September 2011 as a double disc designed to be listened to as two single albums, with the individual parts named Deform to Form a Star and Like Dust I Have Cleared From My Eye. The latest album by Steven Wilson, The Raven that Refused to Sing (and other stories), will be released on Kscope on February 25, 2013. The album was written between January-July 2012 and recorded in Los Angeles in September with Steven's current band line up of Guthrie Govan (lead guitar), Nick Beggs (bass guitar), Marco Minnemann (drums), Adam Holzman (keyboards), Theo Travis (saxophone / flute), and engineered by legendary producer/engineer Alan Parsons. Steven has become known for the high standard of his production and is a sought-after mixer and producer. Artists he has worked with in this capacity include the Norwegian artist Anja Garbarek, Anathema, and Swedish progressive-metal band Opeth for whom he produced and/or mixed four albums. Other projects include Blackfield, a collaboration with Israeli megastar Aviv Geffen which has now produced two acclaimed albums, and Steven’s drone / ambient / experimental outlet Bass Communion.
